Recording industry sues 4 students over file-swapping.

Byline: Dawn C. Chmielewski

SAN JOSE, Calif. _ The recording industry filed copyright infringement lawsuits Thursday against four college students, accusing them of setting up Napsterlike file-swapping services on their campus networks.

The civil suits claim the students exploited academic resources to illicitly trade as many as a million songs without permission from record labels or artists. Then, they publicly bragged about their exploits.

"This is a particularly flagrant way to illegally distribute millions of copyrighted works over the Internet," said Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, the industry's trade association. The students operated "a sophisticated network designed to enable widespread thievery," he said.

The recording industry telegraphed its campus crackdown last October putting 2,300 university administrators on notice to curb student behavior _ or face legal consequences.

Major universities, including Stanford University and Pennsylvania State University, responded with tough new computer use policies, treating music and movie downloads with the same seriousness as other intellectual property crimes, such as plagiarism. Last November, the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., went so far as to seize the computers of 100 midshipmen accused of possessing pirated music.

Thursday's lawsuits, filed against Jesse Jordan and Aaron Sherman of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Daniel Peng of Princeton University and Joseph Nievelt of Michigan Technological University, represent a new, and more aggressive chapter in the industry's fight against campus piracy.

The suits seek not merely to halt the illegal music trading, but to slap each student with a maximum penalty of $150,000 per song.

The RIAA charges that each student, in a calculated attempt to evade university restrictions on illegal music copying, used software known as Flatlan, Phynd or Direct Connect, to create their own underground file-swapping services on their campus networks.

Like Napster, this software scours the networks for song files, creates a central index _ often without the knowledge of individuals whose computer files were being shared _ and processes search requests.

The lawsuits portray one student, Peng, as openly disdainful of Princeton University's efforts to curb illegal downloading. His site is touted as a source of free MP3 music files in an online publication called "The Princeton Pauper," and was the subject of an article in the university newspaper, "The Daily Princetonian."

Some in the academic community applauded the recording industry for placing blame for alleged acts of copyright infringement where it belongs _ individual students. Others, however, criticized the labels for creating an object lesson instead of working with universities to curb the problem that exploits campus resources and infringes copyrights.

"I'm sympathetic with their concerns," said John Vaughn, executive vice president of the Association of American Universities. "But I hope that, as a general practice, a lawsuit would be a course of last resort _ that you would first contact the university or first contact the student. My understanding was that was not the case here."

Phil Leigh, digital media analyst for Raymond James & Assoc. in St. Petersburg, Fla., said the student lawsuits are a sign of growing frustration with the continued popularity of underground services, and two years of eroding CD sales.

"This is just another step in the direction of demonstrating to the public that there will be penalties for what they consider to be copyright violations," said Leigh. "I think they're attempting to take a carrot and a stick approach here. They're whacking a few people with a stick now. And the carrot is the more liberal rules relating to label-backed subscription online services."

Leigh and others also worry that ruinous court judgments aren't the most seductive methods for wooing potential subscribers.

"It does not seem wise to sue your most important customers, because you're alienating the very people you want to keep as customers," said James Burger, whose law firm Dow, Lohnes & Albertson represents technology clients like Intel and Microsoft.

___

(c) 2003, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.).

Visit Mercury Center, the World Wide Web site of the Mercury News, at http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.